Word: coffin
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Yellow Earth. At 4 in the afternoon, six young pallbearers lifted the open coffin with white linen slings and carried it the half-mile to the village churchyard where Russia's endless war is fought even in death-some graves bear tombstones with crosses; others are surmounted by Communism's red stars. Panting and perspiring, the pallbearers deposited the coffin on the mound of freshly dug yellowish earth beside the open grave, within sight of the blue onion domes of the Orthodox Church of the Transfiguration. Several weeping women bent over to kiss the lifeless countenance...
...Chukovsky stepped down from the mound, several young men pushed through the crowd. One proclaimed: "Over the poet's open grave his verses should resound," and began a recitation. Another said something about an "unpublished book," and there were uneasy glances and scattered cries of "For shame!" The coffin was sealed and lowered into the grave and a symbolic pinch of dirt thrown...
...than salami. However, Mama does break up Papa's affair when Delia goes so far as to have a child by him. Mama's triumph is brief; short weeks later, Papa is pinned to death under a collapsing wall. As the keening women cluster about the open coffin, Paolino seems to hear in their voices a lament for his dead boyhood...
...than "Nevermore." As the book opens, Rebeck is gnawing a baloney the raven has liberated ("Damn near ruptured myself," the bird complains), but his meal is disturbed by a funeral procession. When the mourners have left and the newest ghost has learned to free himself from his coffin, Rebeck explains to him what he knows of being dead. A ghost cannot touch or feel, grow tired or hungry. His human form and personality persist for a few weeks until he forgets the substance of his life-first, perhaps, the sound of a subway train, then his address, finally his name...
Author Beagle, 20. has written a wry dialogue with death that may contain no large lump of wisdom but offers a fair selection of small ones. Except for an occasional lapse of taste (a coffin is a "worm Automat"), his ectoplasmic fable has a distinct, mossy charm...